Just came back from NMR training. I was pretty happy as I finally can do my own NMR; I have been bothering my postgraduate to do NMR for me for the one year plus when I was doing research in the lab. I realized that the NMR rules have been relaxed - non-honours year students can now request to be trained in NMR. So fortunate!

This week is the 2nd week of the term and I have attended the lectures for all the courses. The enrolment for Natural Product Chemistry dropped from 20+ to 5! It's nice to have a small class but 5 is too little; many people dropped because the exam is open-book an the lecturer said that most of the time, you'll be solving "jig-saw" puzzle. I guess many dropped the course for practical reasons - who will want to risk their grades, especially most people taking it are in their final semester. Prof. Harisson is a pretty okay lecturer; I will not comment further as he has not gone into the hardcore stuff. Bioinorganic Chemistry has the most people - 64 in total, about 2/3 of the Honours cohort. As usual, it's the classic Dr. Yip style of lecturing and he managed to arouse people's interest in the course by giving a brief overview of cutting-edge bioinorganic lecture in the first lecture today. In any case, the class size is a little too large and all of us were squeezed in a small classroom. Dr. Vinh's Advanced Coordination Chemistry was okay; the usual inorganic stuff for a start and he'll be teaching more advanced stuff later on. Dr. Lu's Bioorganic Chemistry, the graduate module that I am taking, has a lot of readings. His lecture was okay, just that it's a little monotonous. I have selected my project topic for this module and all I need to do now is to find materials and work on the presentation and report.

I need to complete my Honours project proposal soon.